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Burnout Test: 15 Questions, Instant Result, No Signup
A free 15-question burnout self-assessment across the three dimensions WHO uses to define burn-out: exhaustion, cynical distance and reduced efficacy. Instant result, no email, nothing stored.
Most burnout tests give you a single number out of a hundred. That is the least useful shape the answer can take, because two people with the same total need opposite things. Someone who is exhausted but still believes they are good at their work has a recovery problem. Someone who is sleeping fine but has stopped caring has a meaning problem. The total hides exactly the thing you need.
So this one keeps the three dimensions apart and tells you which is carrying the most load.
What this test measures
In 2019 the World Health Organization put burn-out in ICD-11 — not as a medical condition, but as an occupational phenomenon: a syndrome "resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed". It defined it on three dimensions, and those three are what this test scores separately.
Exhaustion
The energy dimension, and the one everybody already knows about. The question that distinguishes burnout exhaustion from ordinary tiredness is not how tired you feel — it is whether rest still works. After a full night's sleep and a genuinely clear weekend, does the tank refill? Ordinary tiredness answers yes. When the answer becomes no, the depletion has stopped being situational.
Cynical distance
Also called depersonalisation, or just cynicism. This is the mind's protective move when exhaustion has no exit: caring less is cheaper than caring and failing. It shows up as irritability with people you used to be patient with, as flatness about outcomes that used to matter, and as a quiet contempt that can surprise you.
It is the dimension people are most reluctant to admit to, because it feels like a character flaw rather than a symptom. It is the one colleagues notice first.
Sense of capability
The efficacy dimension, scored in reverse — the more capable you feel, the lower your burnout score. This is the dimension that misleads high performers. Output can hold steady for a long time after the internal sense of competence has gone, because experience and fear both keep you delivering. A collapse here while your results still look fine is one of the earliest honest signals available, and it is invisible from the outside.
How to read your three subscores
The pattern matters more than the total. These are the four shapes that actually turn up:
| Pattern | What it usually means | What tends to help |
|---|---|---|
| Exhaustion high, other two low | Overload without erosion. You still believe in the work and in yourself; there is simply too much of it, or too little recovery between rounds. | A recovery problem. Protect real recovery before trying to do less — most people at this stage have free evenings that are mentally still at the office. |
| Exhaustion and distance both high | The classic burnout profile. The distance is doing a job: it is what makes the exhaustion survivable. It is a signal about your conditions, not about your character. | A conditions problem. Something has to come off the list — not be managed better. One real removal beats five optimisations. |
| Capability low, exhaustion low | Often not burnout at all. A role you have outgrown, a mismatch with what you value, or a manager whose feedback has gone quiet. Sometimes the early edge of something that deserves a clinician's eye. | A direction problem. Worth examining what changed, and when — this pattern usually has a date attached to it. |
| All three high | Severe strain. People reach this by being conscientious for a long time in a situation that gave nothing back. | Rarely resolves through effort, because effort is the resource that has run out. This is the profile to take to a doctor and to whoever controls the load. |
Burnout, stress and depression are not the same thing
This is the distinction that matters most, and the one no self-assessment can make for you. The three overlap heavily, they can occur together, and burnout can precede or trigger a depressive episode. The differences below are tendencies, not tests.
| Stress | Burnout | Depression | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Energy | Over-engaged. Too much, too urgent. | Disengaged. Empty rather than frantic. | Flattened, often with early waking or oversleeping. |
| Emotions | Over-reactive — anxious, urgent. | Blunted — numb, cynical, distant. | Persistent sadness, guilt, worthlessness. |
| Where it applies | To the pressure. Lifts when the deadline passes. | Mostly to the domain. People often feel fine on holiday and dread Sunday night. | To everything, including things previously loved. |
| What rest does | Helps. | Stops helping — the defining feature. | Does not touch it. |
| Self-regard | Usually intact. | "I am not good at this any more." | "I am not worth much." |
Why rest stops working
Almost everyone who scores high here has already tried the obvious thing. They took the leave. They came back, and inside a week they felt exactly as they had before. This is the most common and most demoralising experience of burnout, and it is predictable rather than mysterious.
A holiday removes the load for a fortnight. It does not touch any of the things that generated the load: the volume, how little control you have over it, whether the effort is recognised, whether the work asks you to act against what you value. Return to an unchanged setup and the depletion resumes from where it paused — which is why burnout research consistently points at working conditions rather than at individual resilience.
This is also why advice to meditate more, sleep better and build resilience lands so badly on someone with a high score. It is not wrong. It is just aimed at the wrong half of the problem, and it quietly relocates the fault to the person being worn down.
How accurate is this test?
Worth being precise, because most pages like this one are not.
- The dimensions are solid. Exhaustion, mental distance and reduced efficacy are a well-replicated structure and the one WHO uses in ICD-11.
- The items are ours, not a validated instrument. These fifteen questions were written against those three constructs. They have not been through psychometric validation, and we have not reported reliability coefficients for them, because we have not run those studies.
- We do not claim an MBI basis. The Maslach Burnout Inventory is a copyrighted, licensed instrument. Several pages ranking for this query claim to be "based on" it. We have not licensed it, these items are not drawn from it, and saying otherwise would be false.
- A self-report is a self-report. How you answer depends on the day, on how much you are willing to admit, and on whether you have language for what is happening yet. Someone deep in the distancing dimension frequently under-reports it.
- No score here means you have or do not have anything. There is no clinical threshold for burnout to cross, in this test or in ICD-11.
What it is genuinely good for: giving a vague feeling a shape, separating the three dimensions so the next step is obvious, and producing a sentence specific enough to say out loud to a manager, a partner or a doctor.
What to do in the first week
- Find your highest single item, not your highest dimensionScroll back through your answers and find the one statement you rated hardest. That sentence is more useful than any total, because it is specific enough to do something about this week.
- Work out whether rest is still workingTake one genuinely clear evening — no laptop, phone in another room. If you feel materially better the next morning, you have a recovery problem and recovery is the lever. If you do not, the load itself has to change, and no amount of better evenings will do it.
- Remove one thing, properlyNot reschedule it, not do it faster. Off the list. At a high score, one real removal does more than five optimisations, because optimising is itself work.
- Say the true sentence to one personStrain is maintained largely by how much of it stays private. One unembellished sentence to someone who can act on it — what you are carrying, and what has to come off — changes more than a month of private coping.
- Bring in a professional if it has run for monthsNot because something is wrong with you. Because a second set of eyes on a long-running pattern is simply faster than working it out alone, and because sustained exhaustion overlaps with conditions that are treatable and that this page cannot tell apart from burnout.
A score tells you where you are. Working out which part of your setup is producing it — and what you are actually willing to change — is a conversation. Brihas is a private thinking partner for exactly that, and it remembers what you said last time.
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About this test
This is an original 15-item self-assessment, not a clinical instrument. It is built on the three dimensions the burnout literature has replicated for decades and that the World Health Organization uses in ICD-11 to define burn-out as an occupational phenomenon: exhaustion, mental distance from the job, and reduced professional efficacy. Those dimensions are public science. The validated questionnaires that measure them — the Maslach Burnout Inventory above all — are copyrighted, licensed instruments, and these items are neither taken from nor derived from them. What you get back is a structured reading of your own answers. It is not a diagnosis, and no score here means you do or do not have a condition.
Sources
- WHO (2019), “Burn-out an ‘occupational phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases”
- Maslach, C. & Leiter, M. P. (2016), “Understanding the burnout experience: recent research and its implications for psychiatry”, World Psychiatry 15(2), 103–111
- ICD-11 for Mortality and Morbidity Statistics — QD85 Burn-out
Brihas is a structured reflection tool, not a medical or diagnostic service. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a treatment plan, or a substitute for care from a qualified professional. If you are in crisis, please reach a helpline or a clinician.